Considering that your Skype messages are being sent through a server before reaching the person on the other end, would you be utterly surprised if you found that your Skype messages are actually being read by the company that owns the software? While we guess it’s nice to think that the folks at Skype/Microsoft aren’t reading our messages, it turns out that maybe they are. This is according to a report by the folks at Ars Technica who teamed up with security researcher, Ashkan Soltani who discovered that links being sent across Skype were access by a machine whose IP address belonged to Microsoft.According to Professor Matt Green at Johns Hopkins University, “The problem right now is that there’s a mismatch between the privacy people expect and what Microsoft is actually delivering. Even if Microsoft is only scanning links for ‘good’ purposes, say detecting malicious URLs, this indicates that they can intercept some of your text messages. And that means they could potentially intercept a lot more of them.”
Green’s reasoning is pretty sound in the sense that they might be on the look out to detect malicious links which could install malware on computers of others, and he does raise a good point as to how this could also mean Microsoft could be intercepting and reading private messages at the same time, even though there is no proof that they are doing that. We guess for the most part most of us don’t have to be too concerned, but for companies who might be using Skype to conduct meetings on products or share sensitive data, this could be a concern. What do you guys think?